Skepticism

EVENTS

Dead squid can dance

Take one squid. Pin it down in a dish. Dissect out one of the peripheral nerves innervating the fin. Plug it into your iPod, and stimulate the nerve with the speaker output while playing Insane in the Membrane. Record the behavior of the chromatophores.

You have my permission, once I’m dead, to run any kind of patterned electrical signal through my nerves to see what my corpse will do. I don’t have the nice chromatophores, but maybe you could get some interesting twitches.

Animating PZ’s corpse. I’m reminded of a standup act where the comedian was discussing the plans for his funeral. Starts out as the usual solemn affair with the casket on display, but it turns out he’s not in the casket when his corpse descends from the ceiling and is manipulated by the puppeteer in tune with the techno music and laser light show that starts playing.

@8: That was my thought. I really hope they didn’t kill a squid just for this. Are ethics committees that oversee animal research supposed to make sure you don’t kill intelligent animals without a strong sciency reason?

Yeah but . . . I’ll betcha the response of the chromotaphores would have been much more engaging had the input been something by the Gershwins or perhaps Gilbert and Sullivan or Emerson, Lake and Palmer or Nat King Cole.

jaredcormier @4:
≤i≥Sorry, the “microphone output” part made me twitch; they must be using the speaker output since the iPod doesn’t have a microphone “output”–it’s an input…

On the YouTube page, Backyard Brains have an update on how this was done.

Update: There are some questions as to what is happening and how this works. An iPod plays music by converting digital music to a small current that it sends to tiny magnets in the earbuds. The magnets are connected to cones that vibrate and produce sound.

Since this is the same electrical current that neurons use to communicate, we cut off the ear buds and instead placed the wire into the fin nerve. When the iPod sends bass frequencies (<100Hz) the axons in the nerves have enough charge to fire an action potential. This will in turn cause the muscles in the chromatophores to contract.